Example 1: True Collaboration for a Win-win in Community-engaged Research
Dr. Marvia Jones, Director of the Kansas City Health Department, spoke on partnerships in community-engaged research at the Life Span Institute's 2024 Collaboratory on January 11th, 2024:
When we think about the word "partner," we can think about a significant other. If I were to say, "What do you want out of your partnership with your significant other?", you may say things like, "you're with me from beginning to the end, you learn about what motivates me, you learn about what excites me, what I need in order to get through the day or the month or the year." Right? And so, I would say, from the community side, regarding partnership and community-engaged research, we want similar things.
We want someone who is with us, who engages us from the very beginning of a process, so we actually feel like a partner. In that process, do we look at the problem together? How do we discuss what both of us need to get out of this?
I've heard this idea of researchers walking alongside community partners. What that also means is if I, as a practitioner, as a partner, need to take survey data to my governing board, or my officials, and it needs to be presented in a certain way - maybe that is not necessarily how the research originally planned to share the information. Well, now we have a dilemma. But as a partnership, through our partnership, we have to work through those solutions.
Those are some of the things that I think we look for in a community-based research partnership, having that flexibility and understanding. One of the things that I noticed, as I went from being a researcher to being in practice, is you lose some of the hours that you used to have to sit and wonder, to brainstorm together in team meetings and research lab meetings, and conferences, where you can consider, “you know what would be cool to think about?”
What I've realized is that once you're in the job of reporting to a board and reporting to a council, you've got to have results. You've got to deliver. We are on a timeframe. And so, we do need a partner who is doing that thinking for us, and with us, making the space and providing information in bites that are accessible and digestible for us. And understanding we don't have a lot of time to pore over data and records. But we do want useful, timely information.
So, when it comes to partnerships, I like to think of it in terms of a marriage where you're trying to really meet each other's needs, mutually.